Crazy

The obviously mentally unstable Elizabeth Hasselbeck is the reason why I stopped watching The View a long time ago. This recent interview with her published by US Magazine shows that she has not seeked any help for her mental issues since then:

"If something happened and I was pregnant again ... I don’t know how that would happen, because I'm clearly avoiding my husband," former NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck.
Not getting intimate is tough. "He's so cute," Hasselbeck, 32, said. "This is the problem ... he's very cute."
Asked if she's ever heard of birth control, Hasselbeck replied, "Yeah, I have. It takes a while to kick in once you start one. But in the meantime, I just find him incredibly attractive. So, it's not like I'm that disciplined, so right now, my strategy is dressing in a way that will not get me pregnant."
How does she dress so that she doesn't get pregnant? "Nothing too cute," she said. "I'm trying to wear nothing too revealing."
 
Whether she is being honest or is doing her cutesy-dumb-blonde thing in order to advance her career is unimportant.What matters is the frequency with which brainless-bimbo-type women (or the ones who pretend to be this way) are thrust upon us everywhere we turn by the media. Being a dumb, illiterate, giggly, winky, inarticulate fool can bring you fame and fortune very fast, as we all have seen in Sarah Palin's example. Given Palin's incredible rise to prominence, it is no wonder that Hasselbeck is going around flaunting her stupidity as well.

Unprofessional Journalism: The Case of Yale University

For several years now, journalists have been whining all over the place that their profession has been dying out. Bad, mean and stupid readers started turning away from newspapers, magazines, and television news broadcasts. Now, more and more readers preferred the Internet to be their main source of the news. There has been no analysis, however, of why people don't trust the traditional media to provide them with news. Journalists are in no hurry to look at themselves as the main source of the public's disappointment with the traditional sources of information.

I was born in 1976, so maybe my vision of what news reporting used to be like in the XIX and the first half of the XX century is based on myths I encountered in books and movies. I always thought that the reporter's main job was ... well, to report. I though that a reporter is a person who would go anywhere and do anything for the sake of a good story.

Today, this is absolutely not the case. Journalists do not report, they do not hunt around for shocking facts and interesting discoveries. Why waste your time and energy doing that when you can limit your job description to sitting at home in a comfortable arm-chair and producing pieces filled with "opinions"? Sometimes, to bolster your opinions you can dig out some quasi-scientific study and manipulate it to fit your "opinion" du jour.

The atrocious murder of graduate student Annie Le of Yale University and the way it is being covered in the press has demonstrated once again just how much the traditional news media have degenerated. Reporters have no interest in actually going to Yale, talking to the students and the employees. Doing that could uncover things that the administration might not welcome. Why would journalists want to go against the enormous, rich and powerful Yale corporation? Uncovering corporate scandal is not what today's reporters want to do. It is so much easier to replicate the Yale administration press releases. And I'm sure it pays a lot better.

Had any of the reporters that keep publishing lies about the "safe" and "crime-free" New Haven actually talked to people who live, study and work in the shadow of Yale corporation, they might have discovered how much crime (both corporate and street crime) takes place on Yale campus. They might have found out that the administration often misleads the students' parents because it needs their money. They might have brought to light the shameful treatment of the Yale grad students, junior faculty, and lectors by the corporation. They might have finally figured out that providing education and doing research comes extremely low (if at all, I sometimes think) in the corporation's list of priorities.

But real reporting is dead. All we have left is a bunch of sycophants who have no interest in looking for the truth and who have the gall to call themselves journalists.

Woman's World

Of course, I don't read this insane magazine but I always stare at it at the supermarket checkout. The way they see a woman's world is beyond offensive. Look at the cover of magazine A, for example. The central article on how to "melt fat" is accompanied by two articles providing recipes for pasta and mocha fudge cake. Plus an article on Hollywood hairstyles. All this is followed by articles on how to get rid of stress and achieve a good mood. Of course, if you spend your life cooking, dieting, and maintaining a Hollywood hairdo in the process, your mood might become pretty lousy.

Now let's look at the cover of magazine B. Three articles on weight-loss, one on recipes, one on looking younger. And then, of course, an article on destressing and finding more energy. Evidently, you'll need tons of energy for all these diets and efforts to look younger.

And these are just two random magazine covers. Cook, diet, look pretty, destress, re-energize, and start the horrible cycle all over again.

Nadia Suleman Obsession

If Nadia Suleman didn't exist, we should have invented her. In this moment of deepening economic crisis, she serves an important purpose for the American society. It is kind of comforting to see someone who is in even bigger trouble and even more financially irresponsible than we are. So what if I have a mounting credit card debt with no hope of paying it off in the next decade? Look at the Octomom, her life is so much more hopeless than mine. Instead of getting angry with the people who got us into the recession in the first place, we can safely and easily direct our anger towards this woman.

It is shocking to see the kind of anger that people exhibit against Nadia Suleman in the media. Do Gloria Allred and the like honestly want us to believe that their hysterical outbursts against this woman are caused by how much they care about the babies? There are so many children all over the world who die every day of hunger, lack of fresh water, and preventable diseases. Somehow, I never see anybody get all worked up about that on Dr. Phil's show. Nadia Suleman's kids are definitely better off that the kids dying of AIDS in third-world countries. And nobody seems to get all that emotional about their plight. All of this song and dance about the octuplets is nothing more than self-congratulatory hypocrisy.